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From: Allen Piscitello <allen.piscitello@gmail.com>
To: Mike Hearn <mike@plan99.net>
Cc: Bitcoin Dev <bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net>
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] New BIP32 structure
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2014 20:13:16 -0500	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAJfRnm7XCZ39t5E1DZvavgtgMPtPCc7RUDpLjgK73vtAEtxJ9w@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CANEZrP2hbBVGqytmXR1rAcVama4ONnR586Se-Ch=dsxOzy2O4w@mail.gmail.com>

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For every branch (say multiple accounts), how would a new wallet be able to
know how many sequence items to scan?  It seems like not only do you need
to have standard rules for the hierarchy, but how the usage can be
detected.  The other scanning seems pretty straightforward.  For accounts,
it seems like you could have a situation where you want to initially set up
10 different accounts, but only account #10 gets any transactions.  If a
new wallet was trying to scan with this seed, it would have to know to keep
scanning each account until it found the account.  The user would have to
be responsible for knowing how many accounts there are, or some rules would
need to be in place to not allow creating accounts until earlier accounts
can be proven to have existed in the blockchain.  Or I am missing something.

-Allen

On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 3:49 PM, Mike Hearn <mike@plan99.net> wrote:

> Myself, Thomas V (Electrum) and Marek (Trezor) got together to make sure
> our BIP32 wallet structures would be compatible - and I discovered that
> only I was planning to use the default structure.
>
> Because I'm hopeful that we can get a lot of interoperability between
> wallets with regards to importing 12-words paper wallets, we brainstormed
> to find a structure acceptable to everyone and ended up with:
>
>   /m/cointype/reserved'/account'/change/n
>
> The extra levels require some explanation:
>
>    - cointype:  This is zero for Bitcoin. This is here to support two
>    things, one is supporting alt coins based off the same root seed. Right now
>    nobody seemed very bothered about alt coins but sometimes feature requests
>    do come in for this. Arguably there is no need and alt coins could just use
>    the same keys as Bitcoin, but it may help avoid confusion if they don't.
>
>    More usefully, cointype can distinguish between keys intended for
>    things like multisig outputs, e.g. for watchdog services. This means if
>    your wallet does not know about the extra protocol layers involved in this,
>    it can still import the "raw" money and it will just ignore/not see the
>    keys used in more complex transactions.
>
>    - reserved is for "other stuff". I actually don't recall why we ended
>    up with this. It may have been intended to split out multisig outputs etc
>    from cointype. Marek, Thomas?
>
>    - account is for keeping essentially wallets-within-a-wallet to avoid
>    mixing of coins. If you want that.
>
>    - change is 0 for receiving addresses, 1 for change addresses.
>
>    - n is the actual key index
>
> For bitcoinj we're targeting a deliberately limited feature set for hdw v1
> so I would just set the first three values all to zero and that is a
> perfectly fine way to be compatible.
>
> The goal here is that the same seed can be written down once, and meet all
> the users needs, whilst still allowing some drift between what wallets
> support.
>
> Pieter made the I think valid point that you can't really encode how keys
> are meant to be used into just an HDW hierarchy and normally you'd need
> some metadata as well. However, I feel interop between wallets is more
> important than arriving at the most perfect possible arrangement, which
> feels a little like bikeshedding, so I'm happy to just go with the flow on
> this one.
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> Bitcoin-development mailing list
> Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
>
>

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  parent reply	other threads:[~2014-03-27  1:13 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 100+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2014-03-26 20:49 [Bitcoin-development] New BIP32 structure Mike Hearn
2014-03-26 23:37 ` Andreas Schildbach
2014-03-27  1:01   ` Alan Reiner
2014-03-27  6:15     ` Mike Belshe
2014-03-27 10:57   ` Thomas Voegtlin
2014-03-27 11:39     ` Mike Hearn
2014-03-27 13:30       ` Thomas Voegtlin
2014-03-27 13:38         ` Mike Hearn
2014-03-27  1:13 ` Allen Piscitello [this message]
2014-03-27  5:34 ` Troy Benjegerdes
2014-03-27  7:09 ` Tamas Blummer
2014-03-27  9:42   ` Mike Hearn
2014-03-27 11:35   ` Pavol Rusnak
2014-03-27 15:43   ` Jeff Garzik
2014-03-27 15:57     ` Allen Piscitello
2014-03-27 16:06       ` Pavol Rusnak
2014-03-27 16:13         ` Allen Piscitello
2014-03-27 16:07       ` Tamas Blummer
2014-03-27 16:14       ` Pieter Wuille
2014-03-27 16:21         ` Pavol Rusnak
2014-03-27 16:28           ` Pieter Wuille
2014-03-27 17:49             ` Allen Piscitello
2014-03-28 14:59             ` slush
2014-04-08 12:43               ` slush
2014-04-08 13:18                 ` Pieter Wuille
2014-04-08 13:40                   ` slush
2014-04-08 13:43                     ` slush
2014-04-08 13:53                       ` Pieter Wuille
2014-04-08 13:59                         ` Thomas Voegtlin
2014-04-08 14:00                         ` Tamas Blummer
2014-04-08 14:35                         ` Pavol Rusnak
2014-04-08 15:41                         ` slush
2014-04-23 17:42                           ` Pieter Wuille
2014-04-23 18:01                             ` slush
2014-04-23 18:18                               ` slush
2014-04-23 18:39                                 ` Tier Nolan
2014-04-23 18:46                                   ` Pavol Rusnak
2014-04-23 19:00                                     ` Tier Nolan
2014-04-23 19:06                                       ` slush
2014-04-23 19:36                                         ` Tamas Blummer
2014-04-23 19:46                                           ` slush
2014-04-23 19:07                                       ` Tamas Blummer
2014-04-23 19:29                                       ` Pavol Rusnak
2014-04-23 19:44                                         ` Luke-Jr
2014-04-23 19:49                                           ` Pavol Rusnak
2014-04-23 19:55                                             ` Luke-Jr
2014-04-23 19:57                                               ` slush
2014-04-23 20:01                                                 ` Luke-Jr
2014-04-23 20:04                                                   ` Pavol Rusnak
2014-04-23 20:09                                                     ` Luke-Jr
2014-04-23 20:16                                                       ` Pavol Rusnak
2014-04-23 20:32                                                         ` Luke-Jr
2014-04-23 20:35                                                           ` Pavol Rusnak
2014-04-23 20:41                                                             ` Luke-Jr
2014-04-23 20:43                                                               ` Pavol Rusnak
2014-04-23 20:54                                                                 ` Pieter Wuille
2014-04-23 21:06                                                                   ` Pavol Rusnak
2014-04-23 21:18                                                                     ` Luke-Jr
2014-04-23 21:22                                                                       ` Gregory Maxwell
2014-04-23 21:33                                                                         ` Pavol Rusnak
2014-04-23 21:42                                                                           ` Pieter Wuille
2014-04-23 21:44                                                                             ` Pavol Rusnak
2014-04-23 21:48                                                                             ` Gregory Maxwell
2014-04-23 21:53                                                                           ` Luke-Jr
2014-04-23 21:24                                                                       ` Pavol Rusnak
2014-04-23 21:07                                                                   ` slush
2014-04-23 20:59                                                                 ` Luke-Jr
2014-04-23 20:17                                                       ` Tamas Blummer
2014-04-23 20:12                                                     ` Pieter Wuille
2014-04-23 20:08                                                   ` Pieter Wuille
2014-04-23 20:01                                               ` Tamas Blummer
2014-04-23 20:02                                                 ` Luke-Jr
2014-04-23 20:04                                                   ` Tamas Blummer
2014-04-24  6:54                                           ` Thomas Voegtlin
2014-04-24  7:10                                             ` Pieter Wuille
2014-04-24  7:21                                               ` Gregory Maxwell
2014-04-24  8:15                                                 ` Thomas Voegtlin
2014-04-24  7:42                                               ` Thomas Voegtlin
2014-04-24  8:09                                               ` Mike Hearn
2014-04-23 18:48                                   ` Tamas Blummer
2014-04-08 14:49                 ` Andreas Schildbach
2014-04-08 15:46                   ` slush
2014-04-08 15:58                     ` Andreas Schildbach
2014-04-08 16:24                       ` slush
2014-03-27 11:20 ` Thomas Voegtlin
     [not found]   ` <CAJna-HhmFya+3W67qQt0wMhW=B4vJvwdkr-5WnU+KEaKq7uaUA@mail.gmail.com>
2014-03-27 12:06     ` Thomas Voegtlin
2014-03-27 12:28       ` Mike Hearn
2014-03-27 12:49         ` Mike Hearn
2014-03-27 13:12           ` Thomas Kerin
2014-03-27 13:19             ` Mike Hearn
2014-03-27 13:49           ` Thomas Voegtlin
2014-03-27 13:58             ` Jim
2014-03-27 14:20               ` Mike Hearn
2014-03-27 15:17             ` Troy Benjegerdes
2014-03-27 13:07         ` Matias Alejo Garcia
2014-03-27 13:44       ` Pavol Rusnak
2014-03-27 13:53         ` Thomas Voegtlin
2014-03-27 14:03           ` Pavol Rusnak
     [not found]       ` <CAJna-HitjJbL9TnfxTY=+TvfaeNvZM6aPWmNYmHUCwmw6V8PUg@mail.gmail.com>
2014-03-27 15:04         ` Thomas Voegtlin
2014-03-27 11:36 ` Pavol Rusnak

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